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Matthew Roszak on building enterprise grade blockchains and the benefits for the insurance industry

08 Feb 2017

The Co-Founder, Bloq and Founding Partner at Tally Capital hosted a breakout session at the Blockchain conference: How insurers are building up trust by breaking down barriers at the Swiss Re Centre for Global Dialogue.

"I think what we're seeing in terms of the key trends for 2017 and beyond is an incredible unprecedented amount of investment in innovation. We're seeing that in the last 12 to 18 months over $1 billion has been invested into the ecosystem. Then secondly, every financial services company, every bank, every insurance company is marching into blockchain and innovating. We're going to see a continuance of this and a proliferation of innovation investment in this ecosystem.

The insurance industry will benefit from blockchain technology primarily through automation and better work flow. On the innovation side, there's also a way to develop new approaches to insurance, for example on life insurance where you have no exclusions in a smart contract that provides value for a consumer. I think some of those innovations based on this technology really transform the way insurance is done today.

I think blockchain is like saying internet 20 years or the cloud 10 years ago. Blockchain today is a journey. It's an infrastructure technology. Although there's two really keystone things that have been invented by blockchain. One is the tokenization of assets. We saw that with Bitcoin. We'll see that with USD coin ultimately, euro coin, and then with digital identity. The tokenization of assets is what's happening. Secondly, it's developing new money networks. We're going to see money and data transferred on completely new rails called the blockchain."